ARNOLD KLING
August 14, 2011
The Top Political Contributors
August 11, 2011
Gender and the New Commanding Heights
August 11, 2011
Jamie Galbraith Makes an Assumption
August 11, 2011
Macroeconometrics: The Science of Hubris
August 10, 2011
Real and Nominal Bond Yields
BRYAN CAPLAN
August 14, 2011
The Effect of Thumb Sucking on Income
August 12, 2011
The Voice of Cold, Hard Truth to All Would-Be Educators
August 12, 2011
Ability, Morality, and Prosperity: A Paper and a Report
August 11, 2011
The Theory of Time and Frittering
August 10, 2011
Male Variance and the Remnants of the Gender Gap
DAVID HENDERSON
August 9, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken", Part Two
August 8, 2011
Hayek in "Unbroken"
August 5, 2011
James Bovard on the Peace Corps
August 4, 2011
Summers Way Off on FDR and 1941
August 3, 2011
The "Amazon" Tax
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I'm just going off of media reports at this point, but it sounds like a key component of the plan amounts to price controls on health insurance. I'm still trying to work out how that will manifest itself in the inevitable in shortages of health insurance.
Will insurance companies just start leaving markets? Will they start refusing applications much more? What do you think?
My two-sentence compromise would be:
1. For Republicans: Medicare's total budget is strictly limited. (Say, $2000 per US citizen in 2010 dollars.)
2. For Democrats: It is politically isolated so you can run it however you want. (You have no legislative ability to, say, revoke patents, but you can also drive as hard a bargain as you want to with providers just on basis of your market size.)
#1 calls the Republican bluff, at least before the Summer of 2009 (when they suddenly decided that limitations of Medicare were now a grievous sin), because it strictly limits government spending. All the people claiming to have re-found fiscal conservatism cannot object.
#2 is calling the Democrats' bluff. "You think you can run a national health care service? Okay, here's a budget that most other countries do fine with. Have at it."
Many states already directly regulate the amount that insurance companies can charge for premiums. So for those states the Obama proposal is just surplusage. For those who don't, why isn't that a matter for the states themselves to deal with? If Californians want to have a panel regulate insurers' charges, they can certainly pursue that through their legislature or through, in California's case, through ballot propositions. If you are a voter in a state that already regulates this, you have to wonder why you should have to pay taxes to support a bureaucracy to regulate some other state's transactions. If you like living in an unregulated state, then you don't like this either. So the only people who might like this proposal are those who like to meddle in others' affairs or those who are too politically ineffective to get their preferences expressed by their particular state.